Awesome, Unstoppable Power

I have to eat my hat for the disparaging remarks I made about Adobe InDesign yesterday. After an afternoon of hypnotizing tutorials, I have come to the conclusion that this program is the most amazing thing since sliced bread (which, by the way, I haven't eaten for four days).

Yes, the interface is completely unintuitive. If I hadn't watched those tutorials, I would still be awash in a button-heavy sea of confusion. But once you know what the heck is going on, you gain ultimate control over all of your graphic design needs. InDesign is like CSS for word processing--you can manipulate everything with a few commands.

Some examples:

• Paragraph, Character, and Object styles
  You can assign attributes to certain groups of paragraphs, characters, or objects to apply with a couple keystrokes to any element you subsequently add. These behave like classes in CSS--altering one of the components in a group edits the assigned parameters to distribute your change through the entire document.


• Master A Sheets
  This is the ".css" stylesheet for your document. Any repeating element placed here will appear on every page...this includes frames, images, page numbers, guidelines, etc. It's a very useful time-saving device.


• Guidelines
  Guidelines are my friend. Not my best friend, but one of my good ones--InDesign automatically measures the distance between anything and everything on your pages. This makes positioning elements incredibly easy. I really wish they had these in PowerPoint when I was a student copying the same slide over and over to preserve the position of an element with changing content.


• GREPs
  GREPs are my best friend. They're the ultimate find-and-replace. You can do things like specify everything in a certain paragraph style prior to a colon to have certain font-weight characteristics, or all numerical digits in a document to be presented in a special font-family, or all words in italics to be set to a new character style so you can change paragraph styles without erasing the format.

The list of spiffy things you can do with InDesign continues. You can designate conditional text, import entire documents and automatically produce the number of pages needed to fit the text into your desired frames, create "book" files to integrate documents from several authors together and synchronize the styling, and and and.

Of course, I'm not a professional designer. There are probably even better programs out there, but from an amateur standpoint InDesign is really darned impressive. I'm going to spend today playing with it, creating "magazines" and brochures for make-believe companies just to feel the power.